Looking at a map, an island gives us the illusion of being a small world unto itself. With its borders clearly delineated, it seems to contain a society impervious to the passage of time and seasons, more immediate to decipher because it is sheltered from the changing complexity of the world. But this is a mystification, all the more so if - like Sicily - it lives under the shelter of one of the most overpowering and unbreakable imaginaries that such a small place has ever managed to create. Behind the island “constructed and reconstructed by books, films, paintings, and black and white photography” today there is a new one, hidden, but no less real. The urban and metropolitan one, the one of landings, the one of wine and tropical fruit. A Sicily sometimes as invisible as the poisons that Europe's second largest petrochemical hub dumps into the sea and into the air. Like the migrants arriving in Lampedusa, kept at a distance from the trajectories of tourists and locals. Like the population outflows that give it the sad record among Italian regions for emigration. A place where extremes coexist, like the downtown neighborhoods in Palermo, where the capital of culture vibrates and the invisible city of crack thrives. Sicily where climate change is transforming the agricultural landscape increasingly at risk of flooding and desertification, and someone is taking advantage of this to replace vines with coffee and avocados. Far from trying to explain it, the pages that follow collect postcards from this new Sicily.They are blurry images, because the subject is in great motion.Because Sicily also moves and, yes, changes.

Notes on a Shipwreck is a novel which in fact describes several different shipwrecks: that of the people who, ploughing across the surface of death, cross the Mediterranean Sea in unimaginable conditions; that of the people who pick them up, at the frontier of an era and a continent; that of the author himself, in his relationship with his father and with the discovery of what really happens on sea and land; and that of words, which plunge down into the depths in an attempt to convey the complexity of the present. Notes on a Shipwreck tells the true story of several people united by direct experience of the fragility of life, which comes like a revelation, making them re-evaluate their lives and carrying them towards a new point of arrival: that of listening.

Davidù grew up in Palermo in a family of boxers, cared for by his mother Zina, grandmother Provvidenza, grandfather Rosario, and uncle Umbertino. His father, who died before he was born, was known as il Paladino, a spectacle in the ring, elegant, composed, precise, agile, with a suit of armor between himself and the world to protect him in fights as much as in life.

He spends his days in a 1980s dirty and violent Palermo, where the Mafia kills in the streets and you have to learn to fend for yourself and defend yourself, otherwise you end up like Gerruso, the little boy forced to suffer the arrogance of the most overbearing. Fights and shootings alternate with tender moments: his love for Nina and the tales of grandma Provvidenza’s past. At only nine years old, Davide begins his journey as a boxer. The Poet they call him, followed by master Franco in the gymnasium of his uncle Umbertino, a boxer also of deadly strength, capable of physical and verbal excesses, yet hilarious and of a deep, almost sweet humanity that contrasts with his impetuosity. He is the guardian of his grandson’s history and, together with his grandparents, the keeper of the family memories that run through the events of Palermo and Italy: from the war in Africa fought by his grandfather Rosario, to the bombs that gutted the city in the years of World War II and then to the more recent ones of the Mafia massacres of ’92 that changed its face forever.

From family history to universal history, with a narrative thread that runs backward and forward in time, as well as the boxer’s dance in the ring, a novel that can be read in one breath capable of touching the most intimate chords and moving to smiles as well as to tears, while dosing, in a language composed and disjointed at the same time, comic and tragic, crude realism and dreamlike abstraction.